


Peelian Principles

by Philomytha



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Book 7: Lies Sleeping, Gen, Kidnapping, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:21:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21825070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philomytha/pseuds/Philomytha
Summary: "You're very calm about this," Seawoll said on the fifth day.
Comments: 61
Kudos: 293
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Peelian Principles

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Luthien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luthien/gifts).



"You're very calm about this," Seawoll said on the fifth day, at the end of a briefing which had taken an hour and a half even though the contents could be summed up in one sentence: we've looked everywhere and we haven't found him. Nightingale had so far failed to persuade Molly to attempt haemomancy again, so instead he had stood next to the statue of Newton and listened and listened and listened. Peter had asked him once whether London spoke to him, and Nightingale hadn't been able to come up with a simple answer to that, so he'd told Peter to focus on his _adjectivae_ and stop messing around. 

But he had felt it, when Peter had been trapped under Oxford Circus, when Skygarden had come down, when that cellar had collapsed, when Chorley went for Walbrook. This time he had felt nothing, and he still felt nothing. 

He had tried to work the way Peter would have worked, asking questions, sending agents, smiling and chatting as if he wasn't walking around like a man with one leg, sending Abigail to try her foxes and ghosts, Zach to tackle the Quiet People with their knowledge of the stranger boltholes of the city, even entering the Chestnut Tree for a pint in the hope of finding someone to talk to him. For the first time, the house hadn't emptied on his arrival, but had treated him with the same cautious kindness that they would show to the recently bereaved. They'd come to like the Starling in the demi-monde; if anyone had news of him he thought they might have sent him word. 

"Would some purpose be served by being anything but calm?" Nightingale returned, calmly. Seawoll was not calm, exhorting his team to work harder, find more leads, but Nightingale could see it was a front too. Seawoll knew how to pace himself.

"We should have more ways of dealing with this sort of thing," Seawoll said in oblique answer. "You say if it was big and magical you'd know about it, but also that if it wasn't magical they couldn't keep Peter in there, so what does that leave us?" 

"Honour," said Nightingale. "They've been using the same technique against us again and again: attack random members of the public and then escape while we deal with the mess. Lesley's been urging Peter to take a holiday, leave off his search for Chorley. If I had to bet, that's what I would put money on, that she's holding Peter by threatening some third party. It wouldn't have to be someone he knows, and she's not foolish enough to pick someone we'd notice. But I think that's what she's doing. She's got a hostage, and so Peter can't act. It's down to us to find that hostage." 

"Hostages," Seawoll returned. "And if you do catch up with Chorley in the meantime and he holds it over you that he's got Peter in a box--"

"You don't suppose it would be the first time that's happened to me," Nightingale said, and this time his voice wasn't calm and he couldn't help it. Varvara Sidorovna had held Peter hostage, and it hadn't done her any good at all. Neither had the Queen of Elfland succeeded. Chorley wouldn't either. 

"And if in the process of arresting him," Seawoll began, then looked at Nightingale's face and thought better of it. "Keep at it, then." 

Left to himself, Nightingale would certainly have seen to it that Chorley did not survive his arrest. But if he didn't get Peter back, if Chorley had killed Peter, then he would let Chorley's perfect by-the-book arrest be Peter's memorial instead.

* * *

Lesley tried it two nights later. Nightingale was keeping his mobile switched on now, day and night, and it rang at eight o'clock, just as Molly was bringing in the coffee after supper. The screen claimed that it didn't know who was calling, and despite himself Nightingale's breathing quickened as he answered, though his hands were steady. 

It wasn't Peter. 

"Got someone who wants to talk to you," said Lesley May. 

There was a protocol for this, and Peter had been good at it. Nightingale too carried a spare phone, powered off, and he pulled it out and began to switch it on and send the message: contact from Lesley. He needed to work more at typing on these phone keyboards, he wasn't as fast as Peter, or any of the other police. 

"Indeed?" he said, and he still kept his voice calm. If she put Peter on the line... they both knew the codes for these kinds of conversations. 

But the voice that spoke into the telephone next was a different man, speaking with the accent of a modern gentleman, vowels a little flatter and blander than a gentleman of Nightingale's own era. Nightingale leaned back in his chair, centring himself, listening. 

"You puzzle me, Master Nightingale," said Martin Chorley in a conversational tone, as if continuing a discussion they'd started earlier. Years earlier. "I understand what you see in Peter, of course, but what benefit do you see in allying yourself with the police? Most of them can't stand you, they get in your way, and interfere with how you choose to conduct your cases. The senior staff are desperate for an opportunity to give you the sack. Folsom's reports on the Folly are particularly harsh. They made me quite angry, reading them. He's such a little worm, and yet you bow to him instead of crushing him with a flick of your finger. Why?"

CHORLEY, he texted to the _Jennifer_ duty team. If they could trace this call... his duty was to stay on the line, keep Chorley talking. Chorley had used Lesley for all his contacts before. This was something different. 

"All power has limits," he answered. He'd listened to this and similar arguments going around the smoking room of the Folly with the brandy. Perhaps if the Folly had still existed, Chorley would have been folded into that group, his arrogance tempered by the knowledge that he had dozens of peers who could call him to account. But if the Folly had still existed as before, he would not have Peter, or Abigail, or Sahra, and they were worth dozens of Chorleys. "I have seen men who believed themselves invincible before, who refused to accept limits. I have cut them down. If I refused to accept my limits, someone else would cut me down." 

"Your Peter would," Chorley agreed. "Wouldn't even blink, would he? Do you really want him back? Perhaps without him, you and I can come to an arrangement. We will have to in the end, you know. Why not simplify matters for us both?"

Chorley couldn't be fool enough to think he'd accept this, could he? Nightingale listened for background noise, but there was nothing. Silence. Silence was not easy to come by in London. "What do you want?" Nightingale asked. 

"I've spent a lot of time getting to know you," Chorley said. "Everyone says the same thing. Not an original thinker, but you want him at your back in a fight. That's why you let Lady Helena take the Third Principia, isn't it? You're not the one to go off and develop a new branch of magic. Peter might, one day, but you--you're Ajax. You're the shield, the sword. You don't want to be the one making decisions, that's why you stayed quietly in the Folly on your own all these years. One day Peter will be your boss, if things keep on as they are, and I don't think you even mind." 

"Peter's a bright lad," he replied. Calmly. Chorley spoke of Peter in the present tense: a slip, or a trick? He did not let himself be distracted by hope. Chorley was still talking. 

"But he's not quite who one wants in charge of things, is he? Consider it seriously, Master Nightingale. Would I really be a worse man to follow than Folsom? I want to keep the Queen's Peace too. I want this to be a better country. You would still defend order and peace. And peace is what you want, isn't it? Peter wants justice, but you want peace. It's lucky for me Peter is around, really. You'd have killed me last year at Hyde Park, if not for Peter and his insistence on justice for all. You'd have killed me to keep the peace. You, after all, have seen the lack of peace looks like, up close. I really do hope we don't have to see anything like that again." 

Nightingale hadn't allowed himself to be provoked in a fight for over sixty years, and Chorley invoking Ettersberg did not alter that. He took a steady breath and texted, DISTRACTION. Chorley might believe he could be seduced so easily, but Nightingale doubted it. That meant Chorley wanted his attention elsewhere, while he acted. He got up and headed out towards the courtyard where terribly young and bright police officers were no doubt trying to trace this call. He doubted they would find the source of it. Lesley wouldn't have made the call if she wasn't sure she could get away with it. But they might find something else. 

"Yes," he said bluntly. "You'd be much worse than Folsom. And do bear in mind my standards for comparison, Martin." 

"I'm sorry to hear that. But please think it through. If you do arrest me and all the rest of it, how long will it be before I'm out again? It will only take one slip, and I'll be a free man again. And then what? Do you really want to spend the rest of your life chasing me down again and again? There must be all sorts of other magical disorder going unnoticed while we waste time and energy fighting each other. Eventually, you will end up working for me, because there is no viable alternative. Peter's dream is like all those idealists' dreams: it looks nice on paper, but you're a practical man and so am I, and we know it won't work." 

"I've done the same thing for sixty years," Nightingale answered. "I'm ready to try something new." He opened the door to the courtyard and saw Seawoll, not quite running, but moving swiftly towards him. Nightingale straightened. 

_We have something,_ Seawoll mouthed, and made a throat-cutting gesture at the phone. Nightingale nodded. 

"There's one more thing," he said to Chorley over his attempt to respond. In the background he could hear noise suddenly, Lesley, swearing loudly. "You are quite correct. Peter would want me to arrest you in the proper manner. But if Peter does not survive to see it, what does it matter?" He pressed the button to finish the call before Chorley could answer. Pressing a little button lacked a great deal, compared to slamming the receiver back on the hook, but Chorley would get the message. 

"Well," said Seawoll. "Now I don't know whether I believe you then or now. Come on. We have a new lead."

* * *

The new lead had fizzled out, tantalisingly. Nightingale was sure something had spooked Chorley, had caused Lesley to swear, but he had no way of knowing which of the twenty-seven different lines of inquiry the team were following had provoked it. He was still sleeping soundly at night, because he'd learned to sleep when he got the chance in a sterner school than this, but he was jumpy, irratible, uncomfortable. Eight days was a long time to hold a prisoner alive. A very long time to hold a practitioner as skilful as Peter. 

Sahra, in passenger seat of the Jag, which he tried and mostly succeeded in not thinking of as _Peter's seat_ , was listening to a report on her radio. "Understood," she said, then to him, "No cross-correlations between Chorley's financials and any of the others. There'll be a money trail somewhere, but we haven't got it yet." 

Nightingale said nothing, overtaking a bicycle smoothly, letting his senses drift wide and attentive. They'd been reduced to this, random sweeps across London in the hope that he might happen upon traces of something magical. Bursts of vestigia came from all sides, but none had any flavour of Peter, or of Chorley, or Lesley. They passed a square brick building standing alone, and Sahra's head went round too at the smoke and fury and pain that boiled off it. 

"Not ours," Nightingale said to her. "Though Peter does like to set things on fire." 

"Lesley wouldn't kill him," Sahra said as they turned right at a roundabout. "She wouldn't." 

"Just keep doing your job," said Nightingale, because there wasn't any other answer, whether Lesley had killed him or not. He had survived decades by just doing his job, not very well as it turned out, but doing it just the same. He'd seen some new grey hairs in the mirror while he was shaving this morning, and was afraid that Peter's disappearance might have an effect on him. 

Sahra's phone rang. She reached for it with the same speed that they all reached for their phones, now. "Oh. Sir. Yes, we're just doing a sweep." _Seawoll_ , she mouthed at Nightingale. "No, no tingles. Lambeth. Okay, I'll tell him." She hung up and said, "Seawoll says don't forget the briefing at nine." 

"I hadn't," said Nightingale, and Sahra's phone rang again while he was waiting at a traffic light, and again, she snatched it to her ear. 

Then she gasped, and said, "Peter," in a voice Nightingale had never heard from her before. The light turned green. Nightingale nearly rear-ended the car in front. "Yes," she said, and put the phone on speaker. Peter's voice came across, tinny and bright and real. Six ways in which it could be a trap boiled into Nightingale's mind; he set those aside for later. 

"I'm got away. I'm out. I'm in the Nisa Today on Coldharbour Lane," Peter said. "I have a, a, someone else Chorley was holding prisoner, with me."

"Were you followed?" Nightingale asked sharply. 

"Oh. Sir. Didn't know you were there too. Hi. Um, I don't know. I haven't seen anyone yet." 

Nightingale flicked on the blue lights and swung the car around, his foot hard on the accelerator. 

"They'll notice we're gone, though," he said. "I... how soon can you get here?" 

"Five minutes," Nightingale said, and drove like a bird racing to its nest. "Hold tight, Peter. We're coming." 

He could see Sahra's face in the corner of his eye as he drove, and he knew that her joy was the mirror of his own. Peter was back. 

When he saw himself reflected in the shop window of the Nisa Today, the grey streak was gone from his hair.


End file.
